Getting There: Blame the Great Depression for no sidewalks in Greenwood

By SCOTT GUTIERREZ, SEATTLEPI.COM STAFF

Published 10:00 pm, Sunday, May 30, 2010

Question:

Getting There recently delved into decades-old claims that the city promised sidewalks to Greenwood and other North Seattle neighborhoods to win support for annexation in 1953. Many longtime residents say voters expected to get paved sidewalks when they approved annexation. But 60 years later, Greenwood still has 200 blocks with no sidewalks, creating some bitterness from folks who think the city reneged on a promise.

But as I reported, nothing in historical documents suggests there was ever an agreement. Thanks to Eric Swensson, a retired Seattle title examiner who read my column, I have more information supporting that conclusion. According to Swensson, who worked for Seattle Public Utilities and the city's engineering department, you can blame the Great Depression for making it harder to get sidewalks in freshly-annexed neighborhoods.

To understand why paved sidewalks are lacking north of North 85th Street, he says, you have to understand how the annexation process worked in Seattle's early years.

Prior to the Great Depression, the city encouraged a process in which developers would approach then-City Engineer R.H. Thompson (an esteemed figure in Seattle history who has Expressway ramps to nowhere named after him) and pitch a tract of their land for annexation, along with the formation of a Local Improvement District, or LID, to pay for needed street improvements such as grading, paving, sidewalks and sewers. Revenue from the LID, through which local property owners tax themselves to pay for transportation improvements, would support bonds issued by the city.

It worked fine for years because everyone got what they wanted, says Swensson, whose job involved researching land owndership, with a specialty in street and utility right-of-way.

Developers got street improvements without having to front the money and buyers got new properties along paved streets and sidewalks. The construction kept Thomson's engineers busy with work and the mayor and City Council expanded the city limits and their tax base without spending general fund revenues on new neighborhood improvements.

"I should note here that this was all on the up and up with Thomson," Swensson said. "No payoffs were made. Instead, Thomson's goals were the expansion of the City, and keeping his people steadily employed. He wanted growth, and to keep that growth orderly and steady -- and that's how it worked out."

Things were humming along until the Great Depression, when people were suddenly unable to pay their tax bills. "The City was then on the hook to pay, from General Fund revenues, for interest and principal payments on the LID bonds," he said.

The financinal burden brought Seattle's annexation and the issuance of LID bonds to a screeching halt, he said. Between the 1930s and World War II, virtually no neighborhoods were annexed. It started up again in the 1950s with the annexation of North Seattle, which brought in 10 square miles of unincorporated land north of 85th Street, adding 40,000 residents to the city's population.

But the city wanted to avoid getting stuck in another financial mess, so LIDs were no longer widely imposed to pay for sidewalks, although some neighborhoods have used them. Without LIDs, sidewalks became "pay-as-you-go" for developers, or the city would pay for them from the general fund. With the latter, sidewalks had to compete with other projects and thus became a lower priority. (Seattle now has the Bridging the Gap initiative, which voters passed in 2006 for street maintenance and construction and includes plans for paving of 117 blocks of sidewalks)